Parent Tantrums

Parenting At The Brink Of Insanity

It’s the usual morning scene at the school door: Parents with toddlers are trying to push in and out, without crushing anyone underfoot (if possible).

But today, our way is blocked. Two mothers, one of whom is pregnant, are standing there screaming at each other. Nobody else can work out what the row is about. The pregnant mother is holding the hand of a small girl, who I recognise as the classmate of my 5-year-old son. The girl will surely remember this mortifying moment for a long time. In fact, the public humiliation inflicted by her mother could end up shaping her life. One day she may even inflict a moment like this on her own children, in a never-ending cycle of inherited insanity.

The row cheers everyone else up. The other children watch, curious and excited to discover that grown-ups can have tantrums too. We adults catch each other’s eyes and exchange half-smiles, the complicity of the sane in the presence of the crazy. But there is more to it than that. We also know that, but for the grace of God, there we go ourselves: Losing it in front of the world at the school door.

That’s because our lives are insane. Almost all of parents today are in the middle of what the Dutch economist Lans Bovenberg has dubbed the modern “rush hour of life”: In your 40s,your career and your family life both hit their busiest moment simultaneously, just as your ability to sleep through the night disintegrates with middle age. Parental exhaustion is like one of those juggling acts where you keep dropping the balls.

One friend of mine, a fellow journalist, tells a story about the time he was doing a phone interview with the then-governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Suddenly my friend’s toddler son, naked but for a pirate eye patch, bandana and plastic sword, materialised in his office and screamed “Ahaar!” into his face. From the other end of the phone line came the familiar Austrian voice: “What was dat?”

No previous generation of parents — and certainly not fathers — invested this much time in childcare. Moreover, whereas the school door closes behind us at 8:40 a.m., in the age of the iPhone the office stays open all night. In short, we’re forever on the brink of insanity. These two fighting mothers are living out what the rest of us are just about holding inside us.

Every day that a modern parent manages to hold it together is a splendid achievement, like running a double marathon on six hours sleep. But just one bad encounter with an equally irritable fellow parent before you’ve had your first, life-giving coffee and the whole mask slips. Today I squeeze through the door, will myself up the three flights of stairs and drop my children off in their classrooms, triumphant. Then I go back to bed for another half hour. One day the men from the funny farm will come for me too, but not quite yet.